white paintwork.
‘Let me help you.’ A woman appeared beside me. With a deft wriggle, she moved the nozzle around so it no longer threatened to snap out and spurt across the forecourt. ‘Go inside, I’ll finish up here.’ She gave me the sort of half-smile I assume most people saved for children and the very elderly.
Behind the counter, another woman was shuffling packs of gum into a display unit. She looked up as I approached and beamed. ‘You don’t have long to go.’
I felt my shoulders sag. I did not have the energy for another of these conversations. The only worse conversation starter was something about how enormous I was. Or a request to touch the bump always asked in the way a small child might approach a petting farm animal.
‘A few weeks.’ I pointedly turned my attention to the display of protein bars and chocolate. It was almost time for second breakfast, a pregnant person’s most important meal of the day.
‘Is this your first?’
I passed her my card and a couple of chocolate bars. ‘No, I have a son. He’s two.’
‘Do you know what you’re having?’
I had promised myself that the next time I had this question, I would reply that I was having a baby. Or perhaps hoping for a small rabbit or chicken. But at that moment, it felt a bit like I’d be telling her that Santa wasn’t real. I sighed. ‘I’m having a girl.’
She half-squealed. ‘You must be so pleased. Daddy’s little girl! Your partner must be over the moon.’
My stomach did a backflip. I backed away, trying to avoid her puzzled gaze as I fumbled my credit card back into my wallet. I could feel tears forcing their way out of the corners of my eyes. ‘Sorry, I have to go.’
When I arrived home, my hands were still shaking, and the blood had left my knuckles from the vehemence with which I had gripped the steering wheel. My feet were on fire, my lower back throbbed and my throat was raspy from crying. I dropped on to the sofa, wincing as I lifted my legs on to the ottoman. I had lost all definition in my ankles, and the bones in my feet were a mere memory.
As I leant back, the wedding photo in a heavy frame on the opposite wall seemed to glint in the sunlight. I had never really liked it – my pre-wedding diet had been overzealous, and my dress ended up a little too big. Every couple of minutes, I had had to hitch it up to cover my bra. My smile was glossy white but forced. It was probably the twenty-fifth photo that had been taken in a row while we stood under a sagging tree branch. Although everyone exclaimed over how happy we looked, with Stephen guffawing at someone over the photographer’s shoulder, I could see in my own face how much I’d worried about the table settings, the accommodation, making sure my parents were not stuck in awkward conversation with Stephen’s boorish newly single uncle and that Amy was not too far into the champagne before she gave her speech.
The photo was only on the wall because I felt it was what we should do when we finally had our – very expensive – delivery from the photographer. Suddenly, I found I could not look at it a moment longer. In two steps, I was across the room and ripping it from the hook. Without thinking, I turned on my heel and strode out to my car. I thrust the chunky frame into the boot. Looking at it lying among the detritus of shopping receipts, some empty lunchboxes and an old picnic blanket, felt apt. I was determined not to stop there.
There were holiday snaps in matching frames on our bedroom wall. A photo of Stephen and his parents, with his niece, was propped on the side table in the spare room. They could all come down too. It was not like he was around to notice.
I worked my way through the house, room by room, pulling photos from their hooks, thrusting the smaller ones into rubbish bags. Only Thomas’s baby photos and one of my family were left in place.
As I walked out after stripping our bedroom, I noticed the door on Stephen’s side of the wardrobe had been left ajar. As usual, his clothes were spilling out, jammed on to hangers and in piles on the wardrobe floor. He would never throw anything out. I grabbed handfuls of material and stuffed them into the top of the big black plastic bags of photos.
Half an hour later, I was driving into the rubbish collection centre in the middle of town, the back of my car laden with the big black rubbish bags, huge photos in frames, T-shirts, hoodies and business shirts. The frames clinked together as I rounded each corner and crashed into the back of the back seat when I stepped on the brake.
The woman who staffed the entrance looked at me quizzically as I drove up. ‘Just a carload of rubbish.’ I gave her my cheeriest smile. My face was probably still streaked with make-up, and my eyes were undoubtedly bright red. She waved me on.
At the edge of the rubbish pit, I stood next to an elderly man who was dropping his own rubbish bags in, watching them flop one on top of each other. The contents of Stephen’s wardrobe landed with a satisfying thump. I hurled the photos one by one, listening to the glass smash on the concrete floor below.
There went our wedding photo. Crash. The time we had lunch on the street in Barcelona. Smash. The evening we spent on the beach in Waikiki after Stephen ‘asked’ me to marry him. The glass in that frame blew apart into a thousand little pieces.
Thomas was swinging on the gate when I arrived to pick him up from nursery, next to a girl in a T-shirt at least two sizes too big for her. They were both filthy from the knees down, with tracks of sand in their hair.
‘Mummy! My mummy!’ he shouted as I hauled myself out of the car.
I pulled his bag out of the cubbyhole by the door, and a plastic bag full of wet, blue clothes came somersaulting down with it. As I had expected, almost everything in his lunchbox was untouched, except for the yoghurt and cookies, which were gone.
He allowed himself to be clipped into the car seat, wriggling as my midsection got in the way while I fastened the buckles. When he was secure, I paused, jangling my keys in my hands. I desperately did not want to go back home – and work could wait. ‘Shall we go to the library?’
‘Yes!’
There was something about the fish tanks, the long staircases and my insistence on quiet that appealed enormously to Thomas when we went to the library. We only had to be nearby, and he started off in the direction of the big grey and glass building. Some of the librarians knew him by name, even though I had been avoiding them and using the self-checkout system for years.
When we arrived, the front sliding doors were emblazoned with posters. Pirate treasure hunt day, dress as your favourite book character … When did libraries become so busy? Then I realised. It was the school holidays. Parents who had forgotten about the library all term suddenly became avid library users, wanting to drop their kids off for a couple of hours, if only to use the free Wi-Fi.
We wandered in. The noise from the kids’ area filtered through, past the reference books, the magazines and the shelves of online orders waiting to be picked up.
‘Can we go and look?’ Thomas pointed at the children’s section and smiled in what I knew he thought was his sweetest way. In truth, it looked as if the dentist had just asked him to show him his gums.
It was some sort of ‘music of the world’ class, led by the same guy who did his best to wrangle a range of kids’ music sessions through the week.
I had started going to one because, in the haze of terrified-new-motherhood, I had been convinced that if I did not have a full week of classes set
